However, George is aware further down the line that the Cambs Glass Stadium needs to be redeveloped – and have the supporters to fill it – if the club is to have a chance of reaching the second tier of the English game without taking huge risks.

He said: “If we’re in this stadium as it is now we’ll never be able to play in the Championship in a sustainable way.

“If we want to have any aspiration beyond League One, it’s going to demand better facilities and everybody know that, but it also demands a bigger fanbase and our job while we’re trying to pursue the development of facilities is to make sure we’re also trying to grow the fanbase.

“I remember in 2006 (when United re-established their youth development programme) it would have been really easy then to have taken a really short-term view and think ‘Josh Coulson is 17, so he’ll get in the first team, and all we’ve got to worry about is that group close to the first team in terms of age’.

“But what you actually have to do is recruit the best seven and eight-year-olds because 10 years later someone would be grateful for that.

“People like Matt Foy are part of that first group and it shows the value of doing things that are 10 to 15 years down the line.

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“The academy is one and youth development is another, but developing the fanbase is another and it’s really important we keep finding ways of getting kids into the stadium and interacting with youth development, community sport and school sport projects because that’s the future of the club.

“In the last three years we’ve doubled the size of our gate receipts, we have 2,300 season ticket-holders, our average crowd is over 4,500, but we know that the next generation is really important so when we’re in 80 schools coaching 5,000 kids every week, we want to make sure they come to a stadium where it’s fit for purpose.

“That’s a challenge for us, but even in this stadium we want it to be a memorable experience and we want to create those magical moments and the staff are really indoctrinated that every young person who comes to the stadium for the first time wants to come back because that’s how you grow the fanbase.

“We want to think of an innovative way of doing that with season tickets next year because every time there’s an empty seat in this stadium, that’s a missed opportunity for a young person to come and watch Cambridge United for the first time.

“That’s how everybody grows to support a football club.

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“We can have the most fantastic facilities, but they’ll be no use without people to enjoy them, so the two things are working pretty much parallel and we’ve just got to make sure we don’t achieve one without the stadium because then a ceiling would appear for the club and stop us progressing.”

For the ground to be revamped, much depends on the outcome of the planning application by United’s landlords Grosvenor for a sporting village and homes at Trumpington Meadows.

And George said it was a case of United making the most of what they had until more was known about the future of the project.

He said: “It’s difficult for us because it’s hard to invest too much into certain areas of the stadium that won’t provide us with income immediately when you don’t know how long the stadium will be like it is at the moment.

“Hopefully for us it won’t be long because it will start to curtail our ambitions and it’s not just the ambition of the team on the football pitch but also the ambitions of the role the club can play within the local community.”